Hello
It’s Thursday, 29th October 2026. Welcome to Bold Efforts!
Almost every week, I come across another prediction about the future of humanity on LinkedIn or X. AI will eliminate most white-collar jobs. The economy as we know it will collapse. Money will become meaningless. We should sell everything, buy land, and prepare for a fundamentally different world….
Some of these predictions come from serious people who understand the technology better than most of us. Others come from people who have discovered that certainty, particularly about catastrophe, attracts attention.
I find it useful to distinguish between what people predict and what they actually do. Someone warning that conventional careers are about to disappear may still be hiring aggressively. Someone predicting economic collapse may still be investing in businesses. Their actions often reveal a more nuanced assessment of the future than their public statements.
Of course, none of this means the concerns are unfounded. But our tendency to predict dramatic outcomes is hardly new.
During the Industrial Revolution, mechanization threatened established livelihoods. Computers were expected to make large sections of the workforce redundant. The internet disrupted entire industries and ways of life. Each transition is like a step function which produced genuine hardship, but also new forms of work, enterprise, and opportunity that were difficult to imagine beforehand.
What these predictions often overlook is that human beings are not passive participants in the future. We help create it.
The history of work is not simply a story of machines replacing human effort. It is also a story of changing expectations, expanding possibilities, and new needs emerging as old problems are solved. As technology makes certain tasks easier or cheaper, we often find new things worth doing.
I suspect AI will follow a similar pattern, even if the transition is faster and more disruptive than anything we have experienced before. Some skills will become less valuable. Others will become more important. The way we work, learn, build businesses, and organize our lives will change.
And adaptation will not be equally easy for everyone. That is precisely why we should focus on helping people navigate the transition rather than treating its worst possible outcome as inevitable.
The future is unfolding in more directions than the most alarming predictions suggest.
Perhaps the most useful response to uncertainty is neither blind optimism nor pessimism. It is to remain curious, keep learning, and retain the flexibility to change direction.
We cannot predict exactly what the future of work and living will look like. But we can have some confidence in our ability to shape it. Our greatest advantage has never been knowing what comes next. It has been our ability to adapt when it arrives. Thank you for reading.
Best,
Kartik
I write Bold Efforts every week to think clearly about where work and life are actually headed. If you want these essays in your inbox, you can subscribe here.